Rangel: Committee chairs sit tall in Texas

With only a week left in this year’s legislative session, for all practical purposes thousands of bills, including high-profile measures such as a texting-while-driving ban or prohibiting smoking in public places, are dead or on life support. And one of the most common complaints is that the chair of the committee a proposal was sent to for the preliminary screening didn’t bring it up for a vote or even gave it a public hearing, in essence killing it.

This was the case with House Bill 63, the texting ban proposal that Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, authored. Though on April 18 the measure passed with a 97-45 vote in the House, it was left pending in the Senate Transportation Committee that Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, chairs.

House Bill 400, the smoking ban proposal, fared even worse. The measure Rep. Myra Crownover, R-Denton, filed, did not even get a vote in the House Public Health Committee that Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, chairs.

A proposal that would have allowed home-schooled students to participate in athletic programs in the school districts where they live faced the same fate. Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen, chairman of the House Public Education Committee, never brought up House Bill 1374, or its Senate companion bill, for a vote.

So, barring an 11th-hour miracle, those and numerous other proposals won’t make it this session, bringing another round of disappointment to the bills’ authors and to the stakeholders of the proposals.

Yet this is a pivotal way the legislative process works, longtime committee chairmen like Sen. Robert Duncan and Rep. John Smithee explain. Committee chairs play a key role in the flow of bills sent to the House and Senate floors.

Though it is disappointing for legislators not to see their key proposals pass, the Legislature has committee chairmen for a reason, and they shouldn’t be second-guessed, said Duncan, R-Lubbock, who has chaired the Senate State Affairs Committee since 2005.

If a bill does not come up for a vote, chances are the committee chairman has already consulted with the panel’s members and knows the measure does not have the votes to send it to the House or Senate floor for consideration, said Smithee, R-Amarillo. Smithee has chaired the House Insurance Committee since 1993, the longest-serving chairman of the same panel, according to the Legislative Reference Library of Texas.

A committee chairman also has the power to kill bills single-handedly. A highly publicized case was in the 2007 session when then-Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas, killed dozens of bills targeting undocumented immigrants.

He decided to kill such measures after consulting with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, Swinford said at the time.

Abbott told him most of those bills — particularly proposals to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of unauthorized residents, or, denying basic public services such as health care and education to undocumented immigrants — would not survive court challenges.

But the biggest factor in his decision was that the state would spend millions of dollars unsuccessfully defending such laws in court, Swinford explained. This is what happened to California in the mid-1990s after voters approved Proposition 187, a measure that would have denied health care and education to unauthorized immigrants.

The power committee chairs have explains why when the speaker of the House, or, the lieutenant governor — the presiding officer of the Senate — make the appointments, the announcements are closely watched.

This also explains why for generations West Texas has had tremendous clout in Austin. Senior legislators usually get appointed and reappointed to powerful chairmanships, and the likes of Duncan, Smithee and Swinford stay or have stayed 20 years or longer.

Despite being outnumbered because the region’s population has not grown as fast as in the rest of the state, West Texas legislators have had a strong voice, thanks largely to the committees they chair.

They have a big say on the flow of legislation, and that’s where much of their influence comes from.

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